First, thanks to Stephane, Betty, James, and Lynda for new comments this week on Playing with Students at Lessons, and thanks to Betty and Jan for comments, some of them pretty detailed, on Collecting the Benjamins (about collecting lesson payments from students). Feel free to comment on any blog articles, however old, in the archive; I will call your attention to new comments made on any article, so they won’t be buried.

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About 6 weeks ago, I wrote “Finding Students For You” about one website that helps students find music teachers. This time, I’ve looked at a number of them, and even conducted a little search-engine survey to help you consider which sites to try.

In thinking about these teacher-student matchmaking sites, it occurred to me that teacher needs are quite different from student needs. Students will want to look for teachers at sites that host the most teachers, so as to get the broadest selections. But as a teacher, you will do better with a site that has fewer teachers from your area, so that when a student looks for a teacher in your area, you show up in as short a list as possible.

There are a few other factors, of course. Some sites are free; others are not. Some have additional services you might find useful. Some are easy to use; others are inconsistent in their search results. Some search results are alphabetized, others randomized, others put premium customers at the top or give them first rights to answer inquiries.

Maybe most important, though, is whether students will actually find the website in order to use it and then find you. To address this question, I offer you my little survey, below. More…

Are you a member of any of the music organizations listed below? Maybe you can recommend a group that’s not on the list. Is there an organization, whether national or local, that you especially like (or dislike)? Please feel free to tell us, by adding a comment at the end of this article; we’d all appreciate hearing about your experiences.

Music teachers and performers are necessarily people-oriented, and yet many are freelancers, running their own teaching studios, and spend precious time alone practicing, listening, composing, arranging, preparing materials.

Bringing them together is the goal of professional music organizations, which offer networking opportunities, educational workshops and conferences, publications, grants, awards, competitions, insurance, websites, with annual dues ranging from $35 to $120.

Before listing some organizations and their websites, I must confess that the reason I first joined a national music organization was to get half-price instrument insurance. More…

You may have noticed various websites popping up to match people up–some are for dating, of course, but others are for matching artists and performance venues, such as www.matchbook.org in New England, and others are for helping students and teachers find each other.

I checked out a few of these student-teacher services to review and describe a bit about how they work, how much they cost, etc. One seems a bit better organized than others, so that’s the one I’ll discuss this week. It was started a little over a year ago, and is called Click For Lessons.

Based in San Diego, the site has grown tremendously. It matches students with potential teachers not only in music, but also in dance, singing, languages, acting, and art. A lot of the categories are musical instruments, so at first I assumed the main use of the site was for music, but the site’s blog has an article listing the most popular lessons requested in 2006, and many of them were for dancing.

The site’s most popular lesson requests last year were, in order: More…

Today we announced four new templates for your personalized studio website! These professionally designed themes will allow you to customize the look and feel of your website to match your personality and give your studio a more professional image.

In addition to customizing the look and feel of your website, your studio website now also includes More…